During the early 1990s, as Cuba suffered the rationing and blackouts of the post-Soviet Special Period, an agreement made to burnish Cuba’s cultural reputation enabled favoured artists to travel to Mexico as ‘velvet exiles’. I used to hang out with some of these fascinating creatures from an artistic Galapagos. To our surprise, they didn’t have much time for Mexico. They rented flats on Cuba Street and talked about nothing but home. Only one jumped ship to Miami – irrevocably at the time. The others soon went back. In Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s new novel, False War, an elderly man leaves the island for the first time to get medical attention organised by his son, who lives in Mexico City. Coming and going is easier now. The father raves about the cleanliness, the hot water, the availability of everything. Yet he, too, chooses to go home. How to explain the mysterious power of a deprived and repressive island which so many have risked – or lost – their lives to leave?
Provisional answers of all kinds float past in this cagey novel about people who leave Cuba (a word excluded from the book) and those who stay. As Álvarez showed in his powerful crónica of the country today, The Tribe (2017; 2019), belonging to said tribe is a permanent condition, wherever you are in the world; something also illustrated by the digital literary magazine he co-founded in 2015, El Estornudo (The Sneeze), requiring a VPN to access in Cuba, whose contributors write from inside (riskily) and outside the island. Álvarez himself (b. 1989) is an exile who intermittently visits – on one occasion in 2020 harassed and placed under house arrest, likely because of his journalism and support for the San Isidro protest movement. He currently keeps his location opaque. Because complaint is wearisome by now, his latest novel doesn’t condemn the regime so much as seek to explore its effects in images and in the suspended meanings of its stories. To what extent is Álvarez concerned with Cuban idiosyncrasy? With migration as the experience par excellence of our time? Or with the human condition as universal existential displacement?
False War is a choral novel in that it deploys a plethora of disparate characters, settings and voices, but these hardly converge in the usual way, though some characters recur in fresh configurations. Whereas The Fallen (2018; 2019), Álvarez’s debut – an exploration of the narrow options of Cuban life through the members of one family – traces the figure of a downward spiral, False War is like a centrifugal vortex. When, late on, the character nearest to an authorial alter ego evokes the novel he’s trying to write (also titled False War, a cryptic phrase from the poet José Lezama Lima), he says: ‘I needed to find the hidden centre, assemble everyone . . . around an inexpressible void. But there was no longer any such centre. It was an exile without nostalgia, memory faded, rage diluted, no verifiable consciousness of struggle or resistance, a kind of exile itself exiled from the symbolic notion of exile’. Hence, we take it, the absence of resolution in so many of the stories, which are composed of reverberant scraps and moments, launched but never quite landing.
If the urge to assemble conflicts with the material’s tendency to disperse, it’s also down to the structure. The novel’s main parts, Modern Lives I and II, are separated by an Interlude – two long chapters featuring another alter ego: ‘the dissident’ being feted in Berlin, who briefly returns to the lost world of his country. Modern Lives I and II are both composed of short sections that alternate between several narrative threads – thirteen in all – the resumption of each indicated by their titles. I don’t know how the casual reader handles this. Does she surrender to the whirl of interruptions, inevitably losing track of the characters’ particulars and what’s at stake for them? As a reviewer, expected to make sense of things, I cheated, writing down the page numbers of each thread’s recurrences, leafing back and forth to reconstruct coherent narratives. So, this is not an account of the work as it was designed to be experienced.
The novel opens with the ‘Miami Beach’ thread. An unnamed Cuban who had been living in Mexico – it’s his father who once came over for treatment – lost his home and girlfriend in the 2017 earthquake and made his way across the border, where other Cubans offer him a couch. There is Elis, who is only happy when driving her car; autistic Juan, who enacts one of Álvarez’s great themes, stasis within mobility and vice versa, by standing still for hours before a map charting the movements of a treasure he’s lost; and the Instrumentalist, whose instrument no one recognizes. Despite the lurking oddity, ‘Miami Beach’ adopts a straight narrative style across its ten segments. The next, ‘Intimate Love Letters’, is a glancing, oneiric thread set in Cuba, about one Freddy Olmos: ‘Outside, a dark green taxi suddenly zigzags and flips over in the middle of the street. On his white bedsheet, half-asleep, Freddy Olmos is neither ugly nor beautiful. In his dream a group of people he knows cross themselves and plunge into the sea.’ Olmos doesn’t leave, but escorts a lover he met in prison onto a plane out, who later turns out to have been the Instrumentalist.
Next comes the first episode of ‘Usual Suspects’, which along with ‘Sewer Rats’ evokes a Havana underworld of petty delinquency, in a dirty-realist setting of wastelands, street corners and shabby digs. A pair of teenage boys recruit an unhappy man to join in some never-explained plan; they wander around town, squabbling half-heartedly, in search for a good place to ‘do it’. At the end of the final episode, the man is glimpsed in the back of a police car, and the boys decide to ‘walk around some more like we’ve got nothing to worry about’. Aimlessness also rules the first segments of ‘Sewer Rats’. The narrator and a sidekick drive around on unspecified dodgy business with a black Vietnam vet on the run, El Gringo. This character is based on a real American fugitive in Cuba, Charles Hill, whose story is told in The Tribe. Hill and El Gringo were raised in the same Illinois town, and their original crime is identical. In 1971, part of a clandestine group seeking to refound Africa in the American South, Hill/El Gringo accidentally killed a policeman in Albuquerque while driving a Ford Galaxy. But where the gentle, depressed Hill was poor, El Gringo has prospered; one night his accomplices impulsively break into his home and some obscure violence ensues. Here lies Álvarez’s double strength as a journalist-novelist: his minutely detailed command of the realities that interest him, and his transformative imagination.
Cubans move like migrants through their own land, False War suggests, at once restless and benumbed by poverty and the ‘dead religion’ of revolution. The lives of those who have left seem equally defined by errancy and stasis. Some rafted it, some flew, some were held up in Guantánamo, some suffered more than others. A curious rivalry exists between those of the ‘first’ and ‘second’ exodus. In ‘The Barber of Hialeah’, a barber called Barber (one of the youths roaming Havana in ‘Usual Suspects’) attacks a client – a new arrival whom he finds too self-pitying, given that the earlier exodus (date unclear), as experienced by Barber, was so much harder. The final lines of the thread exemplify the way Álvarez withholds outcomes:
Blade cut slowly into neck . . . Client stood up and rushed at him. Barber was a little afraid. He had lived with fear his whole life. Even at the last minute he considered stopping or backing away, but his hand had been seduced by the blade and the two of them kept advancing, stubbornly, like a dauntless couple running off in the middle of the night to dance.
The emigrants knock around the US or Europe if they’re lucky, interact cautiously with the natives, feel humiliated or insecure, haunt bars; most do odd jobs, but some find fantastical work, like Elis who becomes Miami’s only specialist in ‘Exceptional Concerns’ (‘Everyone always thought any trouble they had was exceptional’). This is one of several allusions to the issue that Barber had: how much right has anyone to complain, back home or in exile? One incident plays with the idea that Cuban migrants are in a different league of privilege to those from all-out war zones. Invited by a human rights organization, the dissident in Berlin is cynical about everything, from his own fraudulence as a supposed hero, to German cultural and political smugness. Witnessing the arrival of a trainload of Syrian refugees, he is transfixed by the calmness of a small boy. Is he an orphan? ‘Probably the boy doesn’t know either. And yet he does know war, desolation and exile. The dissident would like to erase him from view. For a moment he is shaken.’
If that Berlin section must be autobiographical in part, the second half of the Interlude feels deeply personal. The dissident is now an exile, returning after years to the ‘rural village’, as he calls the place he grew up. He finds himself overwhelmed by nostalgia, pity and love. But first, some supremely technical-instinctual dancing with a stranger helps him recover his body. Standing in his derelict boarding school, reliving the squalor, the defiance, the rich intimations of collective showering, he remembers how ‘the politics of the living body, the integral truth of the body rose above the lather of ideas’. In Modern Life II, there are more moments of defiance and erotic hope. The bushy armpits of a red-haired girl dazzle the narrator of ‘Miami Beach’ (whom attentive readers may twig is Adolescent, from ‘A Day at the Beach’), and the two have sublime, albeit fantasy, sex in a toilet. But there’s also ‘Chewing Gum’, a flashback following the Instrumentalist, lonely in Havana and lying to his mother; and ‘A Tasteless Joke’, about the heightened senses of an Elis on the verge of breakdown, and her evasions of partner Fanboy (who in Modern Life I had a thread to himself, in which he was rude, with a comically untutored anticolonial instinct, about the Louvre).
All the teeming incident circling essential enigmas – we’re left to decide, for example, whether the Sewer Rat will shop El Gringo to the bounty hunters – is epitomized by ‘The Nimzowitsch Drifter’, a hefty three-part sequence in which a chess genius in a coma is told about his life. This must be one of the few successful uses of the second person in literature, nicely complicated when the bedside speaker, Valentín, veers into bits of his own life, notably his failed escape from Cuba on a raft. The Drifter was adopted by Valentín’s chess club at the age of eight, already a strange and single-minded being. When clubs returned after being outlawed (fiction: chess in fact became massified after the Revolution), so the Drifter returned from his wanderings, now wanting to play just for fun. ‘Then you said something in a tone of voice I’d never heard you use. There are two chess pieces nobody’s ever heard of, you said, but they exist . . . the invisible pieces that move the length and width of the board like roving ghosts. The archbishop and the ambassador.’ Whether he can hear Valentín or not, the man in question, the centre, remains ‘a blank’.
The Drifter is not the only character to perceive the invisible in False War. Some even see things into existence. In the thread titled ‘False War’, a proxy for the author glosses over his trajectory since leaving Cuba – ‘Seven years of stumbling around’ – and gradually begins to write. We glimpse his process in this exchange with a host, who asks: ‘Autobiographical? No, I said, not at all, there are lots of characters, interlocking stories, nothing like that . . . I’ll find a way to squeeze you in, I promised’. The writing about the writing intensifies, as he faces ‘stories that burrowed into themselves, retreating from the spotlight that produced them’, or is steadied by visions of irreducible fact, such as ‘a pine tree that could grow nowhere else’. Eventually the book becomes a being: it ‘senses the bustle of the neighbouring building, where life never ceases, and accepts the contrast between the next-door house and this one, its own house, trapped in silence and resignation, and also, don’t forget, trapped by the secret life of objects that never stop radiating . . . ’
In the pulse of the work, exalted verbosity balances the silences elsewhere. Our pleasure lies in the strangeness of the stories’ moments and the breadth of the language – Natasha Wimmer’s English being as plastic as the original. After two readings, I wondered whether Álvarez is a Buddhist. In his characters’ paralysed wandering, nothing is final, and everything can be its opposite. As Adolescent follows the red-haired girl home, the novel’s last words are: ‘I had the feeling we were drawn on a piece of paper and the corner of the paper had been set on fire.’
Read on: Carolyn Lesjak, ‘Writing the Collective’, NLR 154.